Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nichole Coleman. The Right To Difference: Interculturality And Human Rights In Contemporary German Literature. University Of Michigan Press, 2021., Priscilla D. Layne

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Nichole Coleman. The Right to Difference: Interculturality and Human Rights in Contemporary German Literature. University of Michigan Press, 2021. 270 pp.

Emily Johansen. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, And Contemporary Neoliberal Life. Bloomsbury, 2021., Irene Gammel, Jason Wang

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Emily Johansen. Beyond Safety: Risk, Cosmopolitanism, and Contemporary Neoliberal Life. Bloomsbury, 2021. xiii + 171 pp.

T. Jackie Cuevas. Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Culture And Gender Variant Critique. New Brunswick: Rutgers Up, 2018., Caroline E. Tracey

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of T. Jackie Cuevas. Post-Borderlandia: Chicana Culture and Gender Variant Critique. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2018. xiii + 169 pp.

Priscilla Layne. White Rebels In Black: German Appropriation Of Black Popular Culture. U Of Michigan P, 2018., Mona Eikel-Pohen

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Priscilla Layne. White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture. U of Michigan P, 2018. ix + 259 pp.

Special Focus Introduction: Literary Walks, Slow Travel, And Eco-Awareness In Contemporary Literature, Peter Arnds

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to special focus on Literary Walks, Slow Travel, and Eco-Awareness in Contemporary Literature

Wombs, Wizards, And Wisdom: Bilbo's Journey From Childhood In The Hobbit, Rory W. Collins

Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

In The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien constructs middle-aged Bilbo Baggins as a sheltered and emotionally immature ‘child’ during the opening chapters before tracing his development into an autonomous, self-aware adult as the tale progresses. This article examines Tolkien’s novel qua bildungsroman through both a literary lens—considering setting, dialogue, and symbolism, among other techniques—and via a psychological framework, emphasizing an Eriksonian conception of development. Additionally, Peter Jackson’s three-part film adaptation of The Hobbit is discussed throughout with ways that Jackson succeeds and fails at portraying Bilbo’s childlike attributes noted. I argue that Tolkien presents a sophisticated account of Bilbo’s …

The “Anarchy” Of King Arthur’S Beginnings: The Politics That Created The Arthurian Tradition, Andrew D. Pringle

Crossing Borders: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

“The ‘Anarchy’ of King Arthur’s Beginnings: The Politics that Created the Arthurian Tradition” examines Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae in a political and historical context to illuminate the 12^th-century politics that started the Arthurian tradition and show how those politics influenced later works about the legendary king. Based on literary and historical research, this paper covers the transmission of politics in the Historia in three sections: a summary of the politics during the time Geoffrey wrote the Historia, an examination of the way those politics were integrated into the Historia, and finally a consideration of …

Lucille Cairns. Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel. Liverpool: Liverpool Up, 2015., Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Lucille Cairns. Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. x + 310 pp.

Alternate Facts And Reality Effects In Antoine Bello’S Roman Américain, Jennifer Willging

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Like several of Antoine Bello’s eight other novels to date, Roman américain contains a staggering array of minute details, which includes the names of dozens of fictional characters, businesses, associations, institutions, locations, and publications. These fictional proper nouns are intertwined throughout the novel with dozens of real ones, and this promiscuous intermixing contributes to the careful construction of a fictional world that rivals the real one in all its complexity. In this essay I examine Bello’s masterful production in Roman américain of verisimilitude, which he creates largely but not exclusively though his exploitation of the documentary fiction genre. I then …

From The National Context To Its Margins: When The World Used Literature To Respond To The Great War, Toby Garfitt, Nicolas Bianchi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

By shedding light on some original responses to the Great War that are today hardly known, and by asking the same questions of many works written in contexts which were radically different, this STTCL special issue advocates for a genuinely comparative approach to this literature. Born in a context of nationalist withdrawal, these cultural objects also had a paradoxically wide circulation (due to early translations, commentaries, literary reactions, and so on), which is why study of these apparently isolated writers is so valuable.

Carole Sweeney. Michel Houellebecq And The Literature Of Despair. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Xx + 215 Pp., Benn E. Williams

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Carole Sweeney. Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. xx + 215 pp.

Martin Munro. Writing On The Fault Line: Haitian Literature And The Earthquake Of 2010. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014., Linda Alcott

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Martin Munro. Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014.

Tom Burns, Elcio Cornelson, Volker Jaeckel, And Luis Gustavo Vieira, Eds. War And Literature: Looking Back On 20th Century Armed Conflicts. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2014., Paul R. Schue

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Tom Burns, Elcio Cornelson, Volker Jaeckel, and Luis Gustavo Vieira, eds. War and Literature: Looking Back on 20^th Century Armed Conflicts. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2014.

Touria Khannous. African Pasts, Presents, And Futures. Generational Shifts In African Women’S Literature, Film, And Internet Discourse. Lanham: Lexington, 2013. Xxv + 203 Pp., Marzia Caporale

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Touria Khannous. African Pasts, Presents, and Futures. Generational Shifts in African Women’s Literature, Film, and Internet Discourse. Lanham: Lexington, 2013. xxv + 203 pp.

Introduction: Resignifications Of Feminism In Contemporary Germany, Hester Baer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

During the past decade, the German-speaking world has witnessed both a new wave of writing by women and a resurgence of interest in and debate about feminism…

The Mirror In Art: Vanitas, Veritas, And Vision, Helena Goscilo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Humankind’s venerable obsession with the mirror, traceable to the ancient myths of Medusa and Narcissus, is copiously attested in Western art, which historically relied on the mirror as both practical tool and polysemous trope. While the mirror’s reflective capacities encouraged its identification with the vaunted mimetic function of literature and film, its refractive quality enabled artists to explore and comment on perspective, in the process challenging the concept of art’s faithful representation of phenomena. My radically compressed and selective overview of the mirror’s significance in Western iconography focuses primarily on visibility, gaze, and gender, dwelling on key moments and genres …

The Necessity Of Remembering Injustice And Suffering: History, Memory, And The Representation Of The Romani Holocaust In Austrian Contemporary Literature, Roxane Riegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay focuses on the role of memory in Austria. It demonstrates the significance of literary production when addressing and coming to terms with the past. Reflecting on the role of memory in history and literature, I see the boundaries between the two blurring. My inquiry includes several questions: Why should we remember? How can we integrate literature into a theoretical framework of memory and history? Why do authors take the trouble to reconstruct a burdened past or even relive pain and suffering? How do authors address the connections between the past and the present? Is it important to draw …

Patrick Chamoiseau Et Le Gwo-Ka Du Chanté-Parlé , Pim Higginson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Numerous critics have explored the use of orality in Patrick Chamoiseau's work. Solibo Magnificent adds to the opposition between the oral and the written the third term of the musical. Western artistic expression maintains a neat border between the media (e.g. literature, music, the plastic arts) because it helps legitimate the essentialization of (racial, ethnic, sexual) alterity: white maleness writes; the musical is instead associated with otherness (and orality). This hinged or articulated connection between alterity and the musical (and sameness and the literary) assures and assumes that the musical does not signify. This essay contends that Chamoiseau's novel responds …

Epiphanies At The Supermarket: An Interview With Brigitte Kronauer , Jutta Ittner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Brigitte Kronauer has been called "the greatest German [female] fiction writer of our time" (Marcel Reich-Ranicki). Her stories, novels, and criticism have established her as a uniquely sophisticated literary voice and won her many literary prizes. Kronauer's trademarks are her laser-sharp vision, her luminous prose, and the intricate structures of her uncannily realistic literary universes. Finding the mystical in the mundane and exposing human foibles with subtle irony, Kronauer creates, in the words of one critic, epiphanies at the supermarket. Beneath its everyday surface her fiction deals with the eternal human questions of life, death, and love. At a still …

A Lustful Passion For Clarification: Bildung, Aufklärung, And The Sight Of Sexual Imagery , Stephanie D'Alessandro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The equation of education and self-cultivation was an Enlightenment ideal which has become a hallmark of bourgeois culture. Prizing Bildung, the bourgeoisie professed an appreciation for art, music, and literature. Within their libraries, comprehensive scholarly texts intended for academic and well-educated, lay audiences occupied a special place. Marrying illustration with academic investigation, the Sittengeschichte (history of morals) could also be found on the bourgeois library shelf and afforded its readers a glimpse into a world outside the strict parameters of bourgeois propriety. During the Weimar Republic, the demand for illustrated Sittengeschichten increased dramatically among the bourgeoisie, meeting their ideal …

Border Crossings In Maríe Redonnet's Splendid [Seaside] Hôtel, Elizabeth A. Mazza-Anthony

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maríe Redonnet crosses previously established boundaries in Splendid Hôtel and Seaside. Her writing flows across traditional literary genres as she revisits certain motifs, characters, and situations in her novel and play. In addition to crossing the border between the novel and theater, she echoes the works of other authors—specifically Rimbaud and Duras. Moreover, within a particular text Redonnet erases subject boundaries. That is to say, her characters are not individuals; their uniqueness is washed away by a continual ebb and flow of common characteristics and traits. By creating such fluid personae, Redonnet captures the societal homogeneity that is symptomatic …

The Difficulty Of Saying "I": Translation And Censorship Of Christa Wolf's Der Geteilte Himmel, Katharina Von Ankum

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The end of the GDR in 1990 triggered a vivid literary debate in Germany which focused on the interrelationship of politics, literature, and criticism. In this context, the work of Christa Wolf was attacked as primary example of self-censorship and collaboration. In my article, I argue that Wolf became the target of literary criticism largely because of her attempt to express female subjectivity in her texts. In my contrastive analysis of Der geteilte Himmel (1963) and its English translation (1965), I read Wolf's text as an initial attempt at a "socialist modernism." The continued value of this and subsequent works …

Inventing Antillean Narrative: Maryse Condé And Literary Tradition, Leah D. Hewitt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

As a Guadeloupean black woman novelist, Maryse Condé highlights the tensions in Caribbean culture between traditional and modern values, among ethnic groups, and between the sexes. She combines a representative view of an Antillean writer's specific concerns with a postmodern view of literature as multicultural, polymorphous intersection. The opening portion of this essay argues that Condé's personal literary trajectory embodies a general process of identity formation in post colonial literature, one that passes from the alienation of the individual, to the affirmation of collective movements and positive models, and finally, to a critical, playful outlook in which identities are continually …

Some Wheat And Some Chaff: Jean Paulhan And The Postwar Literary Purge In France, Michael Syrotinski

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A somewhat overlooked figure of French literary history, Jean Paulhan has resurfaced in the polemic surrounding the wartime activities of many respected intellectuals, most prominently Blanchot, Heidegger and de Man. Commentators on Paulhan's role in the intellectual history of the period have tended to avoid reading his texts closely. Paulhan—one of the "heroes" of the literary Resistance in France during the Second World War—took the extremely unpopular and controversial stance after the Liberation of criticizing the National Committee of Writers' proposed purge of suspected collaborationist writers. This essay demonstrates the rigorous consistency of Paulhan's position in the context of his …

Introduction, Claire L. Dehon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue on Africa: Literature and Politics

Reflections On Linguistic And Literary Colonization And Decolonization In Africa, Eric Sellin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite the cultural diversity found in Africa and the complexity ofthe psychology of the colonizer and the colonized, several fundamental facts emerge regarding the function of language and literature in recent African history. The colonizer sought to instill a sense of inferiority in the colonized as part of the dynamics of conquest, placing special emphasis on education and language. These notions, lucidly discussed by such social thinkers as O. Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, have analogues in the defense of language everywhere where lingua-political oppression occurs, be it in colonial Africa or on an Arapaho reservation in the American …

The Politics Of Exile: Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, Gay Wilentz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint is a relentless attack on the notions of exile as relief from the societal constraints of national development and freedom to live in a cultural environment conducive to creativity. In this personalized prose/poem, Aidoo questions certain prescribed theories of exile (including the reasons for exile)—particularly among African men. The novel exposes a rarely heard viewpoint in literature in English—that of the African woman exile. Aidoo's protagonist Sissie, as the "eye" of her people, is a sojourner in the "civilized" world of the colonizers. In this article, I examine …

The Dialogical Traveler: A Reading Of Semprun's Le Grand Voyage, Sally M. Silk

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In light of discourse theory influenced by Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, the notion of voice has changed significantly so that we are invited to read discourse in a way that represents a departure from Bakhtin. The theories of François Flahault, Michel Pêchetut, and John Frow, who inquire into the importance of conditions of production of language, are used to explore the vain search for a subject-centered voice in Jorge Semprun's Le Grand voyage. The narrating subject Gerard experiences "homelessness" in discourse because he fails to find a voice of his own. His relationship to music and literature depends on …

Klaus Mann's Mephisto: A Secret Rivalry, Peter T. Hoffer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Critics of the 1960s and 1970s have focused their attention on Klaus Mann's use of his former brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens, as the model for the hero of his controversial novel, Mephisto, while more recent critics have emphasized its significance as a work of anti-Fascist literature.

This essay seeks to resolve some of the apparent contradictions in Klaus Mann's motivation for writing Mephisto by viewing the novel primarily in the context of his life and career. Although Mephisto is the only political satire that Klaus Mann wrote, it is consistent with his life-long tendency to use autobiographical material as the …

Twenty Questions For Noël Arnaud, Warren F. Motte Jr.

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Noël Arnaud, the president of the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Oulipo), discusses that institution's history, its literary aesthetic, and its goals. He offers art assessment of twenty-five years of Oulipian activity, in the course of which he touches upon notions which are crucial to the Oulipo's praxis: the fundamental analogy of mathematics and literature, the role of formal constraint in the literary text, and the mutual complementarity of scholarship in literary history and the practice of innovative literary experimentalism.